this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
144 points (98.6% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35914 readers
1522 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I know memory is fairly cheap but e.g. there are millions of new videos on youtube everyday, each probably few hundred MBs to few GBs. It all has to take enormous amount of space. Not to mention backups.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Falmarri@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Does youtube actually store copies of each one? Or does it store 1 master copy and downsaple as required in real time. Probably stores it since storage is cheaper than cpu time

[–] Generator 8 points 1 year ago

If it converts every video in realtime it will require a lot of CPU per server, it's cheaper to store multiple copies. Also the average video isn't more than some 300MB, less if it's lower quality.

Anyone with Plex or Jellyfin knows that it's better to have the same movie in both qualities (1080,720) the transconding to avoid CPU usage.

It's possible to have fast transconding with GPUs, but with high so many users on youtube that will require a lots of power and high energy prices, store is cheaper.

[–] mangomission@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I believe they store and that’s why it processes lowest res first and works up

[–] patsharpesmullet@vlemmy.net -5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's transposed on the fly, this is a fairly simple lambda function in AWS so whatever the GCP equivalent is. You can't up sample potato spec, the reason it looks like shit is due to bandwidth and the service determining a lower speed than is available.

[–] mangomission@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Are you suggesting they don’t store different versions? This (speculative ik) suggests they do.

[–] NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At a certain point the cost of compute is going to be cheaper than the cost of storage.

[–] mangomission@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you have a source? My instinct is the opposite. Compute scales with users but storage scales with videos

[–] SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

Consider two cases:

  • the most recent MrBeast video receiving millions of views from all kinds of devices (some of which require specific formats)
  • a random video of a cat uploaded 5 years ago, total view count: 3

Design a system that optimizes for total cost.

[–] NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No source but I imagine the amount of videos must be outpacing the amount of users. Users come and go but every uploaded video stays forever.

[–] mangomission@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you might be underestimating how many users YouTube has! According to this, 720,000 hours per day are uploaded versus 1,000,000,000 hours are watched per day!

[–] NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

No assumptions about specific usage. Just that at a certain point or in certain scenarios (that I’m sure YouTube’s engineers fully understand), there’s a point where one becomes more cost effective than the other.

Those are pretty incredible numbers though, wow. The scale of that usage is insane.

[–] patsharpesmullet@vlemmy.net 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That response is almost 10 years old and completely outdated. I've designed and maintained a national media service and can confirm that on the fly transcoding is both cheaper and easier. It does make sense to store different formats of videos that are popular at the minute but in the medium to long term streams are transcoded.

[–] mangomission@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Sure it’s old but the stats I posted in a lower comment show that at YouTube’s scale, it makes sense to store.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

It probably depends on how popular the video is anticipated to be.

I remember hearing that something like 80% of uploads to YouTube are never watched. 80% of the remaining 20% are watched only a handful of times. It's only a tiny fraction that are popular, and the most popular are watched millions of times.

I'd guess that they don't transcode the 80% that nobody ever watches. They definitely transcode and cache the popular 4%, but who knows what they do with the 16% in the middle that are watched a few times, but not more than 10x.

[–] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

In real time would mean more cpu usage every time someone plays it. If converted in advance, they only need to do it once with the most effective codecs.